Reply to Excellent summary about what is so wrong about the MCPS math curriculum

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The elementary curriculum was slow, repetitive, and boring for my child.  Now that my youngest is taking IM, he has MORE gaps than my prior kids who were under the old curriculum for elementary school.

With that being said, I think the Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2 curriculum has potential if teachers actually teach the curriculum with the materials that have been developed and in the order the new curriculum has been designed to be taught.  One teacher my son had was actually on the writing team and the class was very engaging and he was very proficient in the material.

He now struggles with a teacher who started using the new county materials then gave up and reverted to her old lesson plans and textbook.  His class and the other classes at our high school are struggling to pass the county assessments despite getting As and Bs on the school assessments.  Given the poor prognosis for the midyear exam, they have spent since January 4th teaching for the exam.  This is a teacher and ultimately an administrative problem at the school because they are NOT teaching the curriculum as it has been designed to be taught.

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This is where my younger DS is too, and what I was trying to explain above.

I'm not impressed with the revised Algebra and Geometry courses, perhaps they're already changing but my older DS was in Algebra two years ago and Geometry last year.  I couldn't be certain the teachers used the provided curriculum exclusively but I thought they did.  I thought the geometry in particular really didn't gel.  They tried to introduce some concepts like rigid transformations into the discussion of congruent figures.  That is powerful as long as the full machinery is available.  But they don't have that luxury, they are limited to rotations by 90 degrees, reflections about the axes and y=x, and translations because those are the only cases where the new coordinates are immediate to plot.  So examples were cooked where two triangles are congruent because a rotation by 90 degrees takes one to the other.  But they couldn't say anything about ALL triangles that are congruent.  So after spending some time developing the idea of transformations, they're just abandoned without a punch line.

The other problem was algebra was grafted on top of the geometry at every opportunity.  This was clearly intended to keep those skills sharp, the spiral, but it also muddies the discussion of new material.  And sometimes there was a genuine clash between the algebra problem and the geometry problem if one were to take the time to think about both.
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